Michael Feeney Callan

Welcome to Michael Feeney Callan’s web pages. This an information resource for Michael’s work in books, film and broadcast media.

Michael has been writing a series of cover features for BMI’s magazine, Voyager. Printed here is his September profile of Sean Connery, who announced his retirement from fifty years’ acting on his website in June, 2007.

The Return of Sean Connery
By Michael Feeney Callan

There is a tale told by director John Boorman that defines the importance of Scotland in Sir Sean Connery’s thinking. At a dinner party, says Boorman, an erudite lady queried Connery on his thick Scottish accent, playing a Berber, in The Wind and the Lion. “If I didn’t act in my normal voice,” replied Connery, “I wouldn’t know who the hell I am.”

This month Sir Sean gets another opportunity to restate his fidelity to his homeland when he returns for his sixteenth year as patron to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs from August 15th till 26th. Last year marked the festival’s 60th anniversary, making it the longest continually running film festival in the world. It also coincided with Connery’s 76th birthday. Then, he hosted the celebration party at the National Gallery, participated in a lively Q&A and accepted a BAFTA Scotland Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film. “Anyone who knows anything about film supports this,” Connery told the BBC, “because it has produced lots of successes, and it will produce even more because we have a plan to develop it even further.”

That grandstand promise, which whets appetites especially among young UK filmmakers dependent on showcasing and networking, also marked the high point of Sir Sean’s movie year. So ubiquitous has he been on our screens for almost fifty years that we fail to notice his recent absence. 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was his last movie, and in 2004 he off-handedly announced his retirement. The reclusive years that followed, when he retreated to his small bungalow at Lyford Cay on New Providence island in the Bahamas, were dotted with health scares (a benign kidney tumour removed) and staccato commentaries on the progress of Scottish
nationalist goals. There was talk, frequent talk, of a return to high adventure, reprising the role of Harrison Ford’s father, Henry, in the long-promised fourth Indiana Jones movie from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. But Connery, via his LA agent, Doc O’Connor, always shied away from confirmation. In early June, his publicist, Erin Grenz, stated that he was not giving interviews, which tempted many to believe that delicate negotiations with Steven Spielberg were nearing a happy conclusion. But on June 9th Connery finally announced that he was no longer in the running for any acting role. “Retirement is just too much darn fun,” he posted on his website, to the chagrin of millions.

Was Connery really done with the world of film, or was this yet another transitional marker in one of entertainment’s most illustrious careers? What kind of beacon of light did patronage of the Edinburgh festival represent? Hannah McGill, the festival’s new artistic director, speaks of Connery’s continued “year-round advocacy” for the festival. He is, she says, particularly interested in UK film and fussy about the details. “For example, he told me last year that I tended to squeak on the mike, and needed to speak from deeper in my chest. So I have been diligently smoking in the hope of acquiring more gravelly and authoritative tones.”

Connery’s love for film equals his love for Scotland and has its roots in his childhood. Tom Cruise’s early life, as the son of a penniless and neglectful father, is often mooted as the model of adversity. But it pales alongside the deprivations Connery experienced. Fountainbridge, the Edinburgh tenement where he was born, comprised two-room accommodations without running water or toilet facilities. The Connerys were lucky: they numbered just four - mum and dad, Effie and Joe, and Tommy (his birth name) and baby brother Neil. Effie worked as a charlady, Joe as a van driver. Money was so tight that Sean was obliged to work as a milkman’s assistant on a horse-drawn dray from the age of ten. In Neil’s memory, it was Sean’s love for horses, which reminded him of the John Wayne westerns he spent his pocket-money on, that opened the doorway to escape from the tenement life. “I was always surprised that he didn’t make more westerns,” says Neil. “Horses meant the world to him.” (In fact, Connery never lost his devotion and his racehorse, Risk of Thunder, won the La Touche cup at Punchestown in Ireland a record seven consecutive times at the end of the nineties.)

The notion of escape dominated Connery’s teen life. He fled to his maternal grandparents’ smallholding in Fife; he joined the navy; he played junior league football with an eye on the big time. One resident of a nextdoor “stair”, as the tenements were called, remembers seeing Connery on the Meadows, the local green, running day and night. “He looked like a gazelle, like he was trying to run out of his own skin.”

Neil remembers how Tommy finally found the formula: “He discovered that money and education were the real escape options. Both were available to him in the world of entertainment.”

Connery’s journey through film reflects his appetite for self-education. “The great privilege of filmmaking,” he once said, “is visiting other countries and seeing the world through other’s eyes.” This appetite for experience manifests itself in the peerless range of his work. In early movies like Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (which first took him to Hollywood) and The Frightened City, he specialised in playing Irishmen and indeed it was his portrayal of an Irish cop, in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables in 1987, that won him an Academy Award. Variety, however, was clearly the great motivator. In the post Bond years his movies took him to the Middle East (The Next Man), the Arctic (The Red Tent), Scandanavia (Ransom), Africa (The Man Who Would Be King), Russia (The Russia House), Japan (Rising Sun) and the jungles of South America (Medicine Man). “It became hard to keep up with him,” says Neil, who remained working as a plasterer in Scotland, though he forayed twice into movies, making sub-Bond Italian B pictures. “I often felt he was leading the life of an eighteenth century explorer!”

The scope of Connery’s work is matched by his unusual longevity. John Boorman calls him “the eternal leading man”, which hints at the paradox enshrined in his image. Unlike, say, Richard Burton, who defied the aging process and dyed his hair till the end, Connery almost rushed into old age. Balding since his teens, he was happy to discard the James Bond wig as early as The Hill, made in 1965, when he was just 35. By his early fifties, playing Betsy Brantley’s husband in Five Days One Summer, he was stooped and elderly. Still, in 1998, aged 68, he was voted the Sexiest Man Alive by an American magazine and, the next year, cast as Catherine Zeta-Jones’ love interest in the sexy Entrapment. “I’ll tell you how Sean accomplishes that,” says his friend Michael Caine. “It’s down to authenticity. There is nothing phoney about any aspect of what he projects, and women embrace that.”

Connery’s many triumphs, from his multi film awards to his 2000 knighthood, are well known, but his commitment to movies as an educational medium is less reported. His first acting coach was Robert Henderson, an American working at Kew’s Q Theatre during the fifties. Shortly before his death, Henderson told me that James Bond was the worst thing that could have happened to him. When they first met, working side by side in the touring South Pacific in 1955, Henderson had given Connery a list of books to formalise his self-education. “Very quickly he was quoting Shakespeare to me,” said Henderson. “His whole being was lifted. He said to me, I understand now. Within these books are the keys to philosophy, politics, social issues. Everyone should read these.” When he made his first substantial earnings from Bond - £1 million for 1972’s Diamonds Are Forever - he donated it to the education trust for underprivileged kids founded by himself and the industrialist Sir Iain Stewart. “But that act of generosity and the calculated strategy behind it was never properly understood,” said Henderson. “The hype surrounding James Bond overshadowed it, and people spoke about the charity as a tax dodge, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.”

Misconceptions about Connery are easy and they are a consequence of the floodtide of Bond publicity. Roger Moore once told me the hardest part of being Bond was coming up with fresh responses to the same intrusive questions. “You inevitably just muddle your way through,” said Roger. And Sean muddled. “Sean wouldn’t know how to tell a lie if you drew him a diagram,” his old flatmate Ian Bannen famously said of him. The corollary was a gush of knee-jerk responses - often intended as wit or plain bored dismissal - that have distorted history.

The allegations of a penurious nature are particularly ungrounded. It has been said that Connery resented the wealth of the original Bond producers, Broccoli and Saltzman, and refused even to attend the November 1996 Leicester Square industry remembrance for Broccoli in protest. But this, as Connery told the Sunday Telegraph, is all a question of point of view. Today, actors like Cruise, Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt routinely pocket fees above $20 million per movie. In total, for six films spanning a decade, Connery received less than $2 million for James Bond. A griping moment, in context, seems hardly unreasonable.

The commitment to Scotland, and the promotion of education and opportunity, have also fell foul of the misrepresented history. Andrew Fyall, a close Edinburgh friend who helped coordinate the Freedom of the City award coverage in 1991, was emphatic that the city honour meant more to Connery than any Hollywood statuette. Conversely, the feature that appeared in a Scottish daily as the award was granted hurt him more than any bad movie review. The feature stated that Connery avoided Scotland to dodge taxes, and questioned his charity work. “Sean was livid,” said Fyall, “because he has always been a world traveller, and he pays his taxes when he works here.
More important, he has constantly promoted Scotland and put money into Scottish charities. For example, he took $250,000 for a day’s work on Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, solely to donate the cash evenly between his education trust, Dundee Cancer and Heriot-Watt and St. Andrews universities.”

In terms of personal wealth, Connery undoubtedly missed the big time, his career having peaked long before the mega deals of the eighties changed the power grid of the movie world massively in favour of the star. But does he need to court Hollywood for the cash? “No,” said Fyall, “because he has always had his finger in some business pie - a bank partnership, a garage, a farm. But he’ll always go out on a limb to support a Scottish issue he cares about. Or he’ll go out on a limb for a good story.”

Which brings us back to Indiana Jones and the crash of disappointment experienced by fans with the blunt restatement of retirement in June. It is well known that Connery was bitterly disappointed by the failure of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which he judged a failure of expertise. No one can question the record of Spielberg and Lucas in terms of skill and commitment and, indeed, Connery’s statement emhasised, “If anyone could have lured me out of retirement, it was this movie.” Despite the emphasis, a sense of finality remains elusive. One recalls Michael Caine’s summary assessment of his character - “He is not a quitter, he’s a competitor” - and one also remembers the solemn promises at the end of the sixties never to reprise James Bond, which were reversed in the aptly titled 1982 Bond revival, “Never Say never Again”.

The cameras on Indiana Jones 4 will be rolling as the Edinburgh International Film Festival kicks off. Will Connery surprise us with a last minute reconsideration? The organisers can’t yet confirm that Connery will be present this year. Hannah McGill and her team are busy focussing on the mechanics of what has become a highlight of the Scottish cultural year.

“Our current project,” says McGill, “is to refine and push what we’re best at - the programmes. I want Edinburgh to be a crucial event for industry and film buffs alike - great fun, but also a place where introductions are made and projects kicked off. As far as the public audience goes, it’s crucial to keep listening to them and providing the kind of films that they respond
to.”

A sizable portion of festivalgoers will also be hoping that the esteemed patron has been listening to his ever loyal and patient audience and has another movie or two up his sleeve.